I KNOW you want to have a badass daily spiritual practice. You want to rock out those witchy goals, feel connected to the Goddess, have the Divine in your corner always, feel calm and collected and like an EXCELLENT functioning human being instead of a shambling mess who feels confused and irritated because you missed your daily dose of God juice.  

I KNOW YOU WANT THIS. 

And I also know that, despite really wanting it, it’s SOOO hard to do. 

You try to do your daily spiritual work but you fall off track and get disappointed in yourself, or you don’t get the results you were looking for, or you get bored and feel down on yourself because if you were really spiritual, you wouldn’t get bored of this. 

Am I right? 

See, the thing is, as we big-hearted and good-intentioned witchy priestessy lightworkery spiritual folk set forward to create our daily spiritual practice, we forget a few really important things. 

We forget these things because even though we are living and following a spirituality that is so far outside the patriarchal and repressive mainstream, our very foundation of what it means to be a spiritual person is often tainted and coloured by the myths of the patriarchy. 

For example, a place deep within us probably believes that to be spiritual, we have to suffer. We have to do things on our own and shut ourselves away to practice really hard, like a hermit. We have to master and control our mind and thought and body. We need to do spiritual things we don’t enjoy doing, because discipline. We think that nothing good ever came easy. We feel that there are a very set amount of approved “spiritual things” that we have to do: and these are usually cerebral, talky, ascension things like meditation and prayer and solemn ritual. We have to be serious. We think we can’t have fun. 

Usually we don’t even know we have these thoughts and beliefs, thinking we know better having a super radical new age witchy feminist spirituality, so we have NO IDEA these beliefs are influencing our actions.

With these beliefs and thoughts running unchecked and unseen in the background, when we try to create our spiritual practice we end up creating something that is punishing, that isn’t authentic to us, that denies our bodies and is pushing us to be something and someone we are not… because that is what we have absorbed that spiritual practice is supposed to be like.

So here are five tips to help you consciously break that cycle and create a daily spiritual practice that you will LOVE to do every day. 

  1. It’s all about showing up, not showing off. The true devotion of a spiritual practice is just showing up for the divine every day. It’s not about meditating well, it’s not about reciting prayers perfectly, it’s not about proving you are good enough or trying to be a spiritual master: the purpose of a spiritual practice is just to SHOW UP every day to make space for the Divine to come into your life.

    The magic comes from making time for the Divine to suffuse in your life, and to keep showing up no matter what to let the universe know, Hey, I am Here, Hang out with me please.

    It’s not about doing a good job or doing your practice perfectly every time. If you showed up, you did a good job. End of story. 

  2. We often try to do too much. We think “Oh, a perfect priestess would meditate, and then do an altar sanctifying ritual, then do a fifty minute guided meditation, and then practice her healing modality of choice, and then go into prayers for all of humanity and the world, so that’s what I need to do every day or I am failing.”

    Woah now.

    That’s WAY too much expectation on our poor little shoulders.

    If we try to be perfect, we will fail, and we will feel terrible.

    And anyway, that’s the ultimate finish line end goal of a spiritual practice – that isn’t where you start! It’s like picking up a bible and deciding that if you are not just like Jesus instantly you are a colossal failure. It’s like learning to make clothes and deciding the first thing you will do before learning how to do a blanket stitch or master a sewing machine is to hand make a couture bridal gown – it’s madness!

  1. Instead, we start with something easy and manageable and MEASURABLE. Like 15 minutes of spiritual practice a day.

    Then we make it even EASIER and more manageable for ourselves – we halve it to 7 minutes a day.

    Whaaat?!

    Yes.

    Starting with a teeny tiny amount of time means YOU ARE GOING TO GET IT DONE. If you are do your seven minutes and you want to stop, brilliant – you did it! If you get to seven minutes and then you are like… well I’m enjoying this, let’s do it a little longer then WOOHOO!

    When we feel we have a lot to do, say an hour of spiritual practice to get through… man it feels intimidating. No wonder we don’t want to do it.

    But when it’s just seven minutes?

    I mean, we could do that while we are waiting for our casserole to bake. While we wait for the hot water to turn on. While we sit on the bus to work.

    It’s doable!

    It even sounds fun!

    And we feel great when we are ACTUALLY ACHIEVING what we set out to do.

    In my daily practice, I lights my candles and incense and stuff, and then I put a timer on for nine minutes to meditate. At the end of that, I usually go on to do a whole bunch of other stuff, and I’ll be there for about an hour doing this or that, but if I get to the end of my nine minute meditation and I want to stop there?

    I stop. No guilt. I did my time – I did a good job because I showed up. 

    3. Spirituality isn’t meant to be a drag or a form of punishing ourselves. We forget to consider, what would I enjoy? What would be Fun? And force ourselves to do “worthy” spiritual things that we personally find dull and boring.

    We are pagans! We are ALLOWED to have fun!

    Remember in the Charge of the Goddess – “All acts of love and pleasure are my rituals?”

    I think this belief comes in a large part from the our catholic and puritan cultures, where there was an attitude that we had to work hard and feel terrible to atone for our awful human natures.

    So if you find sitting-still-and-thinking-of-nothing meditation a total drag but feel like you should be meditating every day, find some other kind of meditation to do. Maybe you meditate better with chanting, or guided visualisation, or while doing yin yoga at the same time, or with a crystal grid set on your chakras.

    Find something that works for you, something you enjoy.

    YOU ARE ALLOWED TO CHOOSE THE THING YOU ENJOY.

    4. Spiritual practice is NEVER about ascending out of yourself into some bland angelic perfection. We don’t need to try to change ourselves to be more “spiritual”. We don’t need to change our likes and dislikes to suit some ideal image of what a spiritual person looks like. We don’t need to look more spiritual – God doesn’t need any actors. 

    Spiritual practice is always about going deeper into the truth of who you actually are and living from there.

    It’s about being more you.

    So let yourself be you. Stop trying to push yourself to be someone else. 

    5. Sensuality is Sacrosanct. A lot of patriarchal world religions encourage to ascend out of our bodies, disengage with the earthly plane and transcend our sexual nature.

Some of them have a vested interest in this world being sinful and polluting. Growing up in cultures born of these religions we forget that sensuality is one of our greatest tools in bringing ourselves into presence, thus bringing ourselves into connection with the divine.

I used to think that a REAL witch wouldn’t use an altar, have any tools or herbs or oils or anything, because a REALLY GREAT WITCH would be able to do everything in her mind and so wouldn’t need to use those frivolous trappings.

How wrong was I.

There is deep sacredness in watching a languorous plume of incense smoke as it ascends to the heavens – a power in the transformative scent and feel of holy oil on our skin – a magic in the beads of sweat that form as we dance our prayers.

There is a point to all the tools and trappings, the physicality of spirituality. It’s there for a reason.

Sensuality grounds us and brings us into our bodies – essential for our Saturnian world where we live in our thoughts and can so easily get lost there in the clouds – and being present in our bodies brings us into the present moment…

…. which is where the Divine resides…

… which is where we need to be when we do our daily spiritual practice. 

We usually need a little bit of sensual practice to pattern interrupt our minds from the state they have been operating all day and signal that something else is happening, otherwise it’s hard to get in the zone for our sacred work. 

And you need to pick whatever works for you, whether that’s 15 minutes of yoga. Doing a mantra on some prayer beads. Smelling your favourite essential oil, putting on a special silk dressing gown, lighting candles and incense, playing beautiful music, dancing, stretching…

… which means you have to experiment to find out!

***

So there you have it. 

Follow these four keys, and you will be on your way to creating a daily spiritual practice that you not only ENJOY, but that you will actually DO…

… and through showing up to connect in with the Divine every day, it will touch the rest of your life with centredness and presence, and our connection will grow. 

How are you going to change your approach to your spiritual practice after reading this? Let me know in the comments!